Equality and Independence of Races and Peoples by Davis Diego Massey
Equality and Independence of Races and Peoples:
The Plan de San Diego and the “Mexican Race” in the Texas Borderlands
In the midst of World War I and the Mexican Revolution, a document known as the Plan de San Diego emerged in South Texas. Discovered by local police in January of 1915 in McAllen, Texas when they arrested a Mexican national, the Plan called for a total racial revolution against Anglo-Texan power. A few months later, raids in support of the Plan broke out. Historians have primarily disputed over whether the Plan was an authentic product of local Tejano radicalism, or part of a wartime master plan by German and Mexican conspirators. The mystery surrounding its authorship and the raids has contributed significantly to this lack of consensus. My research traces the roots of the Plan’s rhetoric and the movement around it through the history of Mexicanos in Texas. I argue that the Plan’s racial logic demonstrates a real grounding in local history, regardless of its authorship. Rather than focusing on the moment in itself, I follow the lineage of the “Mexican race” which the Plan attempted to mobilize. This approach draws significantly on racial formation theory, which offers a means to understand how such a movement could come about.
Execution of all Anglo-American men above 16 years old.[1] No mercy to Mexicanos who side with them.[2] Absolutely no prisoners. An independent state for Black Americans in the southeastern Black Belt. Restoration of the territories of the Apache and other Indigenous nations. An independent republic constituted by Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California, to potentially be annexed to Mexico in the future. A “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples” constituted only by those who belong to “the Latin, the Negro, or the Japanese race.” Rebellion[3] against the United States government, “ONE AS ALL AND ALL AS ONE.”
These were the broad strokes of a document dated January 6, 1915, that McAllen police first discovered in the possession of a man named Basilio Ramos, whom they had arrested in response to reports of his attempts to foment rebellion. Titled the “Plan de San Diego,” referring to the south Texan city, the bombast of its rhetoric shocked and amused white officialdom. Initially, the judiciary and police dismissed the Plan up as an expression of the insanity of Ramos, a Mexican national. The judge overseeing Ramos’s May 1915 trial in Brownsville simply stated that he “ought to be tried for lunacy, not conspiracy[...]”[4] It simply seemed too extreme to be grounded in the social life and history of the south Texas that they knew. This did not seem like something that ‘their Mexicans’ - a term many Anglos used to distinguish loyal Mexicanos from Mexican nationals or ‘bandits’ - would stand for.[5]
According to the captured document, the Plan was supposed to go into action on February 20th of that year. That date came and went without incident[6]. To some Anglos[7], this seemed to confirm it as a product of the fermentation in derangement of a few outside agitators. Yet, come July, raids by Tejanos and Mexican nationals on ranchers and transportation indeed commenced[8]. The press and police soon identified two militant Tejanos, Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, as their coordinators. They headed a wave of uprisings against the Anglo white supremacist system which had been built up over the past century, with the aim to establish an independent social republic of Mexicanos in the Southwest. The extent of this rebellious movement, how much Anglos could continue to trust ‘their Mexicans,’ came into question.
The Plan de San Diego emerged in a Mexican Revolutionary context, but should be considered thoroughly Texan as well. The Plan’s authorship and motivations are shrouded in mystery, especially the extent of its ties to Mexican nationals.[9] The only person definitively tied to the original document itself was Ramos.[10] One Agustin S. Garza is mentioned as a Tejano sponsor in the original Plan, and two known leaders of the sediciosos, Aniceto Pizaña and Luis de la Rosa, were also Tejanos.[11] Some scholars have speculated on the document as a product of Carrancista-German intrigue, focusing especially on its extremism as indicating “outside agitators.”[12] Other scholars have argued that, though international interests certainly involved themselves, the various iterations of the Plan and associated rebellions prove to be thoroughly Tejano.
[13]After 1915, the borderlands never again saw a comparable event to the uprising of the sediciosos, or seditionists. The subsequent horrific repression of Mexicanos in Texas, known as La Matanza, definitively marked their separation from whiteness. Where this Plan originated, who drafted it and for what purposes, is still a matter of controversy. What is evident, however, is that it was a true product of its time. Its ideas were not the empty ravings of a fringe agitator, but stemmed from decades of systemic discrimination and gradual formation of a distinct—and politically radical—racial consciousness among Tejanos of the borderlands into the early twentieth century.
Although the source of the Plan and the rebellions associated with it is important to inquire about, this is not the only historical question to be asked. The Plan represents an especially ham-fisted expression of a historical moment, representing the racial order that had evolved in the Texas-Mexico borderlands over the seven decades preceding it. This is most evident in its racial rhetoric. Its advocacy for a bloc centered around Mexicano U.S. citizens, its identification of Black Americans and Indigenous peoples as distinct but aligned with Mexicanos, and its intractable hostility to Anglos are all rooted in this regional history.
The timing of the Plan and associated rebellions also matters. They erupted along the Rio Grande concomitantly to the Mexican Revolution and World War I. Emerging in a time of significant historical change, the Plan itself represented a break - things could not go on quite the same as they had gone on before. The compromise social order between Anglos and Mexicanos which treated the latter as ambiguously white could no longer hold. Since Texas became an independent republic in 1836 and the U.S. annexed half of the Mexican Republic in 1848, those of Mexican nationality in the borderlands experienced significant transformations - largely regressive - in their statuses and identities. From this nascent period to the outburst of 1915, a coherent social category of a “Mexican race” made its presence felt. This racial bloc was neither immediate nor natural - the Mexican republic refused to define nationality according to race on the legal plane. To understand how this “race” became the bloc which the Plan organized around, the very genealogy of it must be traced.
This project is therefore first and foremost a pre-history of the 1915 Plan’s racial landscape. It focuses on re-constructing the sedimentation of a history of racialization which the Plan expressed. The blocs proposed by the text are not arbitrary or immediately obvious, nor the attempted absolute break with Anglo white supremacy. It speaks in white supremacy’s language, but from the other side. These racial categories and alignments that the text mobilized are inherent to the history of white supremacy in south Texas. They opposed Anglo white supremacy from within while also internalizing elements of their logic - they agreed that their society stood as one racially distinguished between White, Black, Indian, and Mexican, with no in-between.
This moment, where Mexicanos in Texas tried to extend the fires of revolution from south to north, left a mark in the region’s history for generations to come. Thus, I argue that the text of the Plan can be considered as expressing the spirit of a moment. It represents one perspective and one approach of Mexicanos to their situation, but one which reveals the marks of racial formation in its production. The Plan spoke in blunt and explicit terms, but behind it lurked the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Cortina Wars, the Civil War, settler-colonial wars, Reconstruction, the Garza Rebellion, the Anglo boss’s guns, and the lyncher’s rope. It was not entirely aware of the foundational significance of this to the coherence of the “Mexican race,” but the Plan spoke the language of a marked people. The “Mexican race” is not the opposite of that history of Anglo white supremacist injustice, it is not strictly a remnant from Mexico, but is also immanently within that legacy of scarring.
The Plan de San Diego and History
Scholars have shown that race is far from a natural, ready-made truth, and instead is socially constructed with social consequences.[14] Race is a fiction, but one made ‘necessary’ by actors in socially and historically specific situations. It’s not an individual delusion, although it has no fundamental, rational bottom. Race is created by a history of racialization, rather than race being a solid thing one can truly grab hold of. Historian Natalia Molina touched on this thread in her concept of racial scripts, a concept which she used to “highlight the ways in which the lives of racialized groups are linked across time and space and thereby affect one another, even when they do not directly cross paths.”[15] Race is made, but it is made in the milieu of a historical inheritance. In this sense, one can trace the relational genealogies of differentiated races.
The Mexican “race” especially, being carved out of a ‘colorblind’ nationality, is one which formed directly out of exclusions.[16] Legal scholar Tanya Katerí Hernández, in her work on Latino anti-Blackness, argues that “Latino mestizaje situates anti-Blackness as a culturally foreign North American construct learned only once in the United States when ‘racially innocent’ Latinos encounter racist thinking for the first time.”[17] This ideology strictly delineates the United States white supremacy context from Mexican mestizaje, or racial mixing, and thus by extension the very category of Blackness associated with the former.
Building on Menchaca’s work, I relate elite categorizations and orderings directly to popular, everyday self-identifications. I am interested in identity formation on both the top and the bottom. In examining the relation between the two, I am strongly influenced by the philosopher Frantz Fanon. Fanon, a Black anti-colonial militant and psychiatrist, wrote about this process in the mid-20th century African context as the oppressed taking what is given and making it their own. Yet, in this identification with what others mark them as, they internalize elements of elite codings.[18] By keeping Fanon’s warning in mind, we can understand how even in explosively militant moments, rebels can speak in terms of those they rebel against. This is how I understand the “Mexican race,” which Hernández and Menchaca demonstrate is so fundamentally defined by exclusions. Every identity constitutes itself out of both inclusions and exclusions. The latter are just as important to understand the logics of identities as are the former.
By focusing on the making of the Plan’s racial rhetoric, I aim to situate it in the history of the borderlands. This is already taking a stance on it as, in some way, organic to the milieu. Early academic articles on the Plan rejected this approach, characterizing it as a product of outside agitators.[19] The most prominent and recent reiteration of this interpretation comes from Charles H. Harris and Louis R. Sadler. They begrudgingly acknowledge the influence of Anglo racism towards Mexicanos on the formulation of the Plan.[20] However, polemically they dismiss those who emphasize this as “ideologically driven, with disregard for inconvenient facts.”[21]
The first re-assessments of the Plan de San Diego came on the wings of the Chicanx movement during the 1970s, especially with historian Juan Gómez-Quiñones’s 1970 article in the journal Aztlán, which set a tone for the evaluation of the Plan as potentially an authentic “Plan by Mexicans in Texas to reclaim the Southwest and liberate the oppressed people living within its border.”[22] From this point onward, historians began to take the Plan more seriously, even where they did not necessarily consider it to be a liberation movement. This project of re-evaluation has influenced borderlands studies as a whole, with historians often referencing it in interpreting other borderlands events and actors.[23]
I consider this transition to essentially be the solidification of a “Mexican race.” Although the character of such a race was not unambiguous after this point, it was consistently a point of identification for factions from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).[24] This coherence across the spectrum of political worldviews indicates a consciousness of a common experience, especially for the Tejano Progressives and ‘post-Progressives’ who carried the memory of La Matanza in their activism.[25] I believe this aspect of racial formation in the Plan and rebellion as a whole is neglected, although race itself has been central to its treatment. For the most part, the historians who have concerned themselves with it have taken the “Mexican race” as a given, at least practically. Johnson, for instance, refers to people of “Mexican ethnicity,” while Sandos speaks of a discourse of racial solidarity without investigating the formation of such an identity.[26] Harris and Sadler certainly have no serious analysis of how living within white supremacy itself creates this Manichaean situation and thought.
Through the method of close reading of primary sources, I pick up this neglected thread with an emphasis on racial formation. My methodology in handling these sources is strongly in the tradition of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s critical theory of “common sense.” He defined this as “the conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed.”[27] Gramsci did not desire to merely demonstrate the irrationality of the things we take as a given. Although he often criticized everyday “common sense,” he also stressed its historical necessity. This interest in understanding the ‘why’ of everyday categories and forms of “common sense” motivates my approach to the “Mexican race.”
By closely reading the language and concepts embedded in these primary sources, I retrace the formation of the “Mexican race” in all of its banality. This approach challenges any characterization of the Plan de San Diego’s rhetoric as a mere aberration or moment of insanity. Whatever one thinks of it, it expressed in explosive terms what was already immanent in the everyday identifications of the region. It held a historical rationality reflective of this borderlands space rather than being seemingly concocted out of the void by a few individuals or conspiring governments. In sum, the bombastic rhetoric has a reason.
Young Texas and the Racialization of Mexican Citizenship
To trace the racialization of Mexicanos in Texas, I must begin with the incorporation of this group into a new republic. Although Texas did not immediately aim for incorporation into the U.S., it formed originally as a republic of Anglo-Americans. It thus shared the historical baggage of U.S. common sense and racial matrixes. From the outset, it followed its eastern mother republic in defining its citizenship as white.[28]
The U.S. legal definition of citizenship conflated it with whiteness from the very beginnings of the Republic. The 1790 U.S. Naturalization Act established as a prerequisite for naturalization that a person was “a free white person[...]”[29] This excluded Black and Indigenous peoples from becoming U.S. citizens. The Republic of Texas followed this precedent in its 1836 Constitution, as well as explicitly excluding “Africans, descendants of Africans, and Indians[...]”[30] Though the Texas Revolution gestured to Mexican Federalist principles, it moved most decisively within this U.S. lineage of white republicanism.
And yet, from the beginning the white republicans found a problem posed by the Mexicano population of Texas. Immediately, the very racialized body of the Mexicano posed a concern to these Anglos. Mexico operated as a mestizo, or mixed-race, republic. Moreover, from the Plan de Iguala onward, the republic defined citizenship on a ‘colorblind’ basis and did not fundamentally forbid so-called ‘miscegenation.’ Thus, to Anglo eyes, Mexico appeared as the ultimate “mongrelized” society, and Mexicanos as the embodied degeneration of “mongrelization.”[31] With the Mexicano population of Texas being significantly brown-skinned, having “Indian” and “African” features, and having little race-consciousness by Anglo-American standards, they disgusted white republicans.[32] Furthermore, Texas had long been a hub of Afro-Mexicano presence from New Spain to the Mexican Republic.[33] In the eyes of the Anglo Southerners settling the region, they were living examples of what their society would look like if they did not keep the darker races beneath white citizens.[34]
Mexicanos did not only pose a problem phenotypically, however. What they represented to Anglos extended to the definition and morphology of civilization. Mexico’s mestizaje republicanism, which claimed ‘colorblindness’ in citizenship and governance, directly contradicted Anglo-American white republicanism, which distinguished between white freemen citizens and internal or external outsiders. Mestizaje republicanism called for a homogenous citizenship which would legally be regardless of race, defining citizenship in civilizational rather than racial terms.[35] Such republicanism considered people to be fit for citizenship according totheir way of life, especially in terms of production, religion, and adaptation to a state society. Where it excluded Indigenous peoples, it considered them civilizationally deficient before considering them racially deficient.[36]
White republicanism, on the other hand, represented a distinct modality of settler-colonialism to Mexico. Its proponents similarly demanded a certain homogeneity among citizens, but primarily defined by race.[37] It conflated citizens with white freemen, thus defining others as either second-class citizens or non-citizens. Mexican mestizaje republicanism operated as a very assimilative form of a colonial civilization, while Anglo white republicanism made sharp distinctions and tried to manage society according to such an order. Thus, to Anglo settlers, Mexicans embodied these mestizo civilizational ethics at the same time as they physically represented a “mongrel” people.[38]
All of this weighed heavily in the minds of Anglo-Texans when they set out to establish a new republic. They could not simply exclude Mexicanos entirely - after all, Anglos and Mexicanos alike fought in the Texas Revolution.[39] The Revolution deployed the terms of both U.S. Jacksonian democracy and Mexican Federalism. Even the most militantly Anglo-Saxonist Texans couldn’t afford to immediately exclude all Tejanos from state and society. The 1836 Texas Constitution set a basis for the problem’s management by its negative definition of citizens as non-Black and non-Native, and leaving the definition of “free white” indeterminate.
Furthermore, Texas existed as a mestizo society - a characteristic representing even the everyday lives of Anglo-Texans.[40] This mestizaje operated as the exact mechanism which the ruling class and plebeian Mexicanos alike used to incorporate the Anglo-Texans into the fabric of their society. By the very fact of this interweaving, strict delineation could only be possible on paper.
In these conditions, Mexicanness could not be conflated with a race strictly distinct from the “white race.” The Texas Republican constitution’s precedent, followed for the most part by Anglo legislators, bureaucrats, and judges up until the post-Civil War era, settled on the compromise of an open whiteness. Those Mexicanos who were not so phenotypically and civilizationally “Black” or “Indian” could claim a de jure white status, especially if they were Tejanos in the upper echelons of society. When the U.S. began to incorporate Texas as a state in 1845, both the U.S. and Texan Congresses debated intensively over this ambiguity. Many militant white republicans, such as Francis Moore Jr., desired to deprive all mestizos of citizenship.[41] This attitude was a growing one in the period leading up to the 1846-1848 Mexican American War.[42] Anglo-Texans found such a position untenable in this period, however, and the state constitution reaffirmed the Republic-era compromise leaving whiteness open to interpretation.
[43]The provisions of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, on this basis, extended only to Mexico-Texanos who were not caught in the legal net of “Black” or “Indian.” The language of the Treaty itself implied a sharp distinction of Mexicans from “Indians,” or at least non-assimilated indios bárbaros, such as in its provisions to aid “any Mexicans should now be held as captives by any savage tribe within the limits of the United States[...]”[44] In the Texan context, this delineation compounded on an existing distinction between “Black” and “Mexican” according to the conflation of the former with alienation and unfree legal status.[45] By only including a negatively defined group of Mexicanos in the treaty and citizenship rights of “Mexicans,” a certain Mexicanness specific to the Texan context began to be sketched out. This Mexicanness represented something like an enclosed mestizaje civilization, with the bodies of “Mexicans” being its vessels.
The Treaty itself implied the beginnings of this Mexicanness within but distinct from Americanness in its provisions for naturalization. It called for Mexicanos to give up the “character of citizens of the Mexican Republic” in order to enjoy the status and rights of U.S. citizenship.[46] This speaks essentially in terms of civilizational values, and implies a positive definition of Mexicanness to be targeted in assimilation. This positive and negative definition of Mexicanness by U.S. legal maneuvering set an early basis for what would become a “Mexican race” within the region.
The Early Emergence of a “Mexican Race”
In the wake of annexation, Tejanos looked upon the bright burning of Mexicano-hatred among Anglo-Texans as setting the stage for an alienation of Tejanos from Texan civil society. The state and civil society, traditionally organized according to principles of a mestizaje that incorporated Anglos into social cohesion, were now being claimed by Anglos for Anglos. Juan Seguín, a Tejano bourgeois and former Texan Revolutionary, expressed the feeling of many Mexico-Texanos when he said in 1858 that he felt as “a foreigner in my native land[...]”[47] Men of a similar status, such as rancheros like Juan Cortina, similarly felt their grip on political representation slipping. Post-1848, Mexicanos in Texas lived an increasingly ambiguous and uncertain social position. Texas was clearly no longer theirs, but neither did Anglos equivocate “Mexican” directly with “Black” or “Indian” as a wretched intractably outside race.
Much of the Mexicano defense against racialization involved continuing a strategy of mestizaje.[48] This protected some mestizos from the net of early anti-miscegenation policies, which focused on punishing Black-white relationships.[49] As the Civil War loomed, however, the glue bonding the ruling classes of Anglos and Mexicanos together began to dissolve. In the 1850s, with the problem of distinguishing Black and white people in the national consciousness, Anglo-Texans began to eye Mexicanos more suspiciously. They began to invoke affinities of Mexicanos with Black slaves, on the basis of Mexican republican abolitionism, and with Indigenous peoples, on the basis of their “mongrel” character.[50] Growing class distinctions especially intensified these suspicions and fears. Many Mexicano workers toiled side by side with Black slaves, and the latter looked to Mexico and Tejanos as allies in emancipation.[51] Many enslaved people in Texas fled to Mexico for freedom and potential citizenship, leading many Anglos to suspect the existence of a Tejano Underground Railroad.[52] The Tejano elite still considered themselves racially distinct from the Mexicano working classes, seeing themselves as closer in civilization and constitution to their fellow Anglo-Texan elites.[53] Nevertheless, the aggressive consolidation of land by Anglos and legal biases in favor of them meant many Mexicanos began to view themselves as alienated from Anglo officialdom.[54] Although they officially had the rights of citizenship according both to Texan law and Treaty promises, Mexicanos came to know that these were near dead letters. Mexicano land rights did not enjoy nearly the favor of Anglo legal claims, though Anglo-Texan land claims based their legitimacy on a continuity with Mexican precedent.[55] The gap between law, which treated Mexicanos as white citizens, and jurisprudence, which rarely shared that premise, grew as Anglos remade power in their own image. Old labor systems of patronismo, or paternalism, broke down in favor of an impersonal and strict ranching system.[56] Anglo ranchers began to racialize property ownership in land grabs against Mexicanos.[57] The Anglo elites in the newly incorporated State of Texas widened the gaps between ruler and ruled, owner and worker, landed and landless, citizen and non-citizen, and Anglo and non-Anglo as they built a white, slave-holding state.
In the midst of this upheaval, a social movement of Tejanos emerged around the figure of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina. Born in 1824 in Camargo, Tamaulipas, just south from Rio Grande City in the U.S., Cortina came from a wealthy ranchero family which owned extensive lands in the borderlands of Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Tamaulipas.[58] During the Mexican American War, he fought in defense of Mexican claims to Texas territory.[59] Upon U.S. victory, however, the border split his family’s estate between American and Mexican sovereignties.[60] As with many other Mexicanos, Anglo ranchers and legal officials worked to dispossess him of his lands in the U.S.[61] Thus, Cortina’s personal resentment against these men had the potential to flare into a broad social movement against Anglo officialdom. His resentment burst into rebellion when in July of 1859 he saw Brownsville town marshal Robert Shears beating Cortina’s former ranch hand, an elderly man. Cortina shot Shears in rage, attempting to kill him.[62] From here onward, there could be no turning back. He commenced raids on Brownsville Anglos, recruiting Tejanos to fight for him along the way.
Cortina issued his first pronunciamiento, or declaration of rebellion, on September 30th, 1859 to explain his grievances and aims. In the text, he denounced the Anglification of the state and civil society, stating that Anglo legal officials had been persecuting Mexicanos “for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin, considering us, doubtless, destitute of those gifts which they themselves do not possess[…]”[63] This first pronunciamiento, considered the beginning of the first Cortina War, did not speak in explicitly racial terms. In fact, he authored it with the intent to avoid alienating potential Anglo allies - the subtitle of the document directs it towards “the inhabitants of the State of Texas, and especially those of the city of Brownsville.”[64] There is no direct racial specification here, and he is careful not to lump other Anglos in with the specific officials he had gripes with. In fact, in this attempt at appeasement, he goes as far as to say that “Our oppressors number but six or eight.”[65] Shying away from outright vigilante justice, since “Hospitality and other noble sentiments shield them at present from our wrath,” he instead calls for the government to either prosecute the “six or eight”[66] officials or “leave them to become subject to the consequences of our immutable resolve.” Though he did not exclude the possibility of violent retaliation, he carefully maintained it within the framework of loyalty to the U.S. This read as a very moderate document, which downplayed the racial separation of Brownsville Mexicanos from other citizens as having been “by accident alone.”[67]
Nevertheless, Cortina showed his consciousness of the alienation of Mexicanos from Texas society and their sense of being outsiders within it. He explicitly acknowledges this aspect of being foreigners in their own world, and of being a coherent outsider group within the U.S., in calling for full U.S. citizenship rights for Tejanos and denouncing Mexican intervention in the war.[68] He revealed traces of a racial sensibility in a subtle statement that “[...]all the aspirations of the Mexicans are confined to one only, that of being freemen[69][…]”[70] This is immediately after he identified the U.S. as “the classic country of [liberty’s] origin” and reaffirmed the loyalty of the Cortinistas to the country. Though he did not say so directly, this reference to “freemen [libres]” status directly separated the appeals of Mexicanos from Black Americans, who were excluded from Texas and U.S. citizenship in this period. In the context of the First Cortina War, this may have been his way of distancing himself from abolitionism. He did not seek to make the unfree free, but merely to abolish the gap between law and jurisprudence in the case of citizenship and Treaty rights for Mexicanos. In spite of his quite restrained language, which refused a wholesale condemnation of Anglo-Texan society or a social revolutionary flavor, Anglos met the pronunciamiento with fear and rage.[71] They saw the potential for a racial upheaval in his rebellion, and feared the vengeance of Mexicanos on Anglos as a whole.[72] The broad appeal of Cortina among working-class Tejanos appeared as a brewing storm to them.[73] Certainly, this wasn’t entirely unfounded - however, it was these followers who organically expressed militancy rather than Cortina. During an October raid on Brownsville, Anglo residents reported hearing the rebels shout “¡Viva Cortina y mueran los Gringos! [Long live Cortina and death to the Anglo-Americans!]”
[74]This Tejano popular racial rhetoric, expressing a consciousness of racialization, directly influenced a shift in Cortina’s rhetoric. His second pronunciamiento, issued in November, explicitly referred to Mexicanos as a “race,” which Anglos considered “unworthy[...] to belong to the human species[...]”[75] Contrasting to the first pronunciamiento’s appeal to “citizens” in general, this one directly addressed “Mexicans!”[76] Cortina treats this address as a synonym of “Compatriots.”[77] Such an identification signifies that this phase now aimed to compose Mexicanos into a racial bloc, rather than to focus on making a moderate appeal to Anglo citizens as before. This is further exemplified in how Cortina extends his denunciations in racial terms. The document appealed to the positive virtues embodied in this “Mexican race,” while conversely denouncing Anglos as a decadent and destructive race.[78] He called for a total revolution “against all the artifice interposed by those who have become chargeable with their division and discord[...]”[79] From calling for the rights of “freemen” to demanding the destruction of Anglo officialdom, Cortina’s Tejano followers and the resistance of Anglos had pushed the war into a social revolution.
The San Antonio Daily Herald expressed what many Anglo elites were thinking, asking “What great difference is there between the outlawry of Opossum [John] Brown, or whatever his name is, and that of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina?”[80] To them, Cortina’s raids on Brownsville looked little different to Brown’s raids on Harpers Ferry. Even with his restriction to the mere demands of Mexicans “being freemen,” Anglo-Texans saw Cortina as a wild prophet of racial revolution against the Anglified social order akin to “Opossum Brown.” In a sense, their intractability against his demands made this a self-fulfilling prophecy. By refusing to restore the old mestizaje strategy of legal and social interweaving of Mexicanos and Anglos, they confirmed the alienation of Mexicanos and gave motivation for them to rebel.[81] Facing the guns of Texas Rangers and militias, Cortina responded to December defeats with a year-long hiatus. He retreated to Burgos in Tamaulipas, while his Tejano supporters continued to gather their forces.[82]
In April of 1861, the U.S. Civil War had begun over the issue of slavery.[83] Texas proved a stronghold of the Confederacy, particularly due to the foundational relationship between Texan nationalism and chattel slavery. The very month after the war began, Cortina re-emerged and aligned himself with the Union against Anglo-Texan officialdom in the Second Cortina War. He re-commenced his raids on south Texas, drawing from a pool of Mexico-Texanos with a strong resentment of Texas’s ruling elites.[84] He now explicitly aligned with abolitionist sentiment, confirming an agreement with his Tejano followers on the social revolutionary character of the movement.[85] The Cortinistas represented a militant movement of Mexico-Texanos in a closely related tendency to radical abolitionism.
In this Civil War context, however, they were the militant edge of Tejano politics. Most Tejanos had little investment in the War insofar as it did not directly draw them into it.[86] Many did not speak English, and both Confederate and Union officials alike tended to be ignorant of the Spanish language. To many, the war appeared as something thoroughly “Anglo-American,” in both language and race. With Texas having separated Mexicanos and Black Americans in legal status, many of the former did not see why the issue of slavery concerned them. Elite Tejanos often supported a slave society explicitly, throwing their weight behind the Confederacy.[87] In the Texas-Mexico borderlands, Mexicanos took advantage of the war situation to rake in record profits on their wares, including labor.[88] Mexicano recruits to both armies were primarily motivated by the pay offered to soldiers rather than any ideological commitment.[89] The war was not their war, it was an intra-racial conflict of ‘los gringos’ to either be ignored or profited from. Despite this general indifference, Tejano soldiers found themselves disproportionately singled out or punished by both armies.[90] Both Unionists and Confederates tended to look upon them as untrustworthy outsiders, as a treacherous race allergic to principles. The Civil War intensified alienation and indifference towards both forms of Anglo officialdom among Mexicanos.
Cortinista consciousness itself made a distinction of a “Mexican race” from other oppressed “races” quite clearly even in forging coalitions with them. Many Black American Unionists sympathized with Mexican Liberalism in Mexico’s civil war, and respected Cortina as a representative of it.[91] Cortina accordingly recruited significant numbers of Black Americans to his forces, while Cortinistas looked upon them as allies against Anglo-Texans. Notably, a May 1861 Cortinista demonstration in Matamoros shouted “¡Mueran los Gringos! [Death to the Anglo-Americans!]” and “¡Mueran los Yankees¡ [Death to the Yankees!],” but excluded Black people from this anti-American hostility.[92] Their recognition of the racialization of American citizenship as Anglo also meant a recognition of a potential alignment with Black people as another “race” considered by Anglos as “unworthy[...] to belong to the human species.” Despite this affinity, however, Cortinistas still considered their aims as distinct from the aims of emancipation and as concerning a different “race” from the “Black race.”[93] Black Americans spoke English, marking their status as an oppressed group within Anglo society, and enslaved people were oppressed well within the limits of legality. On the other hand, Mexicanos in the Cortinista movement still aimed at a consistent application of the law - namely, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo - instead of a change in their basic de jure status.
Similarly, the Cortinista movement appealed to Indigenous peoples in its focus on land rights, but it was still far from an Indigenous social movement. Cortina himself had participated in Indian Wars as a young man, fighting against Comanches, Taraucahuas, Tampacuas, and other “Yndios Bárbaros [Barbarous Indians].”[94] Tejano identity developed in a foundationally settler-colonial context.[95] One corrido, or folk song, from before the Mexican American War expressed a terror of Comanches: “The little Indians are coming through the canebrake/Oh mommy! Oh daddy! They want to kill me.”[96] Here and elsewhere, Tejano identity is triangulated as one of Mexicano settlers in a precarious colonial context, representative of Mexican civilization in a ‘wilderness.’ Nevertheless, in this second phase of the Cortina Wars, the movement included Indigenous Tampacuas in its bloc.[97] Militants considered the fight against Anglo-Texan hegemony in this period to include all those excluded from it, even if that bloc stood internally distinguished by racial and ethnic alignments.
Cortina’s Second War, however, proved to be a failure. After a decisive defeat by the Confederate Army in Zapata, Texas, Cortina retreated to Tamaulipas. He would no longer offer leadership to Tejano Cortinistas, though they continued to admire him as a folk hero while Anglos accused him of aiding them in cattle raids.[98] Cortina died in 1894, considered by Mexican nationals as a broken man and a failure after being imprisoned by the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Mexico-Texanos, however, maintained his memory as a folk hero of the “Mexican race.” One song in remembrance of him expressed this sentiment, reminiscing how “the honor due him is greater, for he saved a Mexican’s life” and lamenting that “The Americans made merry, they got drunk in the saloons,/out of joy over the death of the famed General Cortinas.”[99] This corrido, reconstructed from fragments of others, expressed a collective sentiment of many Tejanos. Even here, the singers recognized that “American” functioned as racially equivalent to “Anglo.” Mexicanos were still without citizenship rights, and further outside of officialdom and standing than even in Cortina’s day. Though Cortina disappeared from the Texas context, the Cortinista legacy continued to beat in the hearts of a population with a growing consciousness of its racialization.
Mexicanos in Reconstruction and the Gilded Age
The project of Emancipation and Reconstructing the nation in the wake of the Civil War meant a changing racial field across the republic, explicitly bringing up questions of race and citizenship. The Civil War-era alienation of Mexicanos from “Anglo-American” concerns, however, extended into this reformation. The de jure anti-Black definition of citizenship was abolished by the 14th Amendment and struck from the 1866 Texas Constitution.[100] Nevertheless, Mexicanos still stood in an ambiguous position. The bureaucracy of Reconstruction, embodied especially in the Freedmen’s Bureau (FB), essentially conflated Blackness with freedpeople. Anglo planters recognized this, with one Texas planter referring in 1874 to freedpeople as “Fifteenth Amendments” who offered more resistance at work than “Mexicans.”[101] In this, federal officials helped to sharpen the line between “Black” and “Mexican” in racialization amid a program of racial freedom and uplift. The exclusion of “Indians” from the 14th Amendment and extension of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) represented a similar phenomena of bureaucratic definition. “Indians” were those considered by the federal government to belong to a specific tribal nation recognized by the U.S. as a “domestic dependent nation.”
The Reconstruction era, despite being a major break from the Antebellum order, continued many of the same practices of race and citizenship. Although both the FB and BIA represented different approaches to Black and Indigenous peoples than those of the 1836 and 1845 Texas Constitutions, they meant a similar top-down definition of races. The law and the bureaucracy would define the races which they addressed, whether to assist them or to restrict and regulate them. Likewise, they left the official definition of “Mexican” highly ambiguous, refusing to break the old compromise of legal whiteness and jurisprudential alienation of ˆ. Most Mexicanos in the post-Civil War period could vote, and were the majority of enfranchised citizens in the borderlands.[102] The losers of elections thus often called their citizenship into question, playing on Mexicanos’ ambiguous legal status to a political advantage.[103] In this south Texas context, Tejanos grew painfully aware of the contrast between their experience in an Anglo society and the experiences of Mexicanos south of the border.[104] Class in the Texas borderlands grew increasingly racialized by the land seizures of Anglo ranchers, and by the growth of a two-tier labor system.[105] Tejanos came to know themselves as neither American nor Mexican nationals.
Historian Richard White famously called for a consideration of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as directly overlapping periodizations and this is certainly true in the case of Mexicanos in south Texas.[106] At the same time as Anglos and Black Americans took up the task of reconstructing state and civil society, racialized class distinctions grew wider. Anglo legislators and bureaucrats crafted reforms to rationalize society in their image, particularly in the name of securing capitalist norms of property and labor.[107] This meant the clearing away of much of the Mexican legal precedent that early Texas had referred to as precedent, directly endangering the statuses of Mexicanos who had relied on the old compromise order.
Reconstruction in Texas thus targeted both the Anglo Antebellum order and the Mexican legacy that it had embedded within itself.
By the end of Reconstruction, Anglos commenced a period of stark dispossession and racialization of Mexicanos parallel to the construction of Jim Crow in the midst of Southern Redemption. The 1877 El Paso Salt War offers a particularly illustrative episode of this. An attempt by Anglo capitalists to privatize a local communal salt lake on the basis of the 1866 Texas Constitution provoked retaliation from local Mexicanos.[108] Anglo land enclosure meant the enclosure of Mexicanos into a distinct race, by incorporating them as a subordinated people subject to Anglo-U.S. laws and destroying their customary laws. Land dispossession went hand in hand with racialization, and so this social movement should also be considered a revolt against incorporation into U.S. sovereignty as a subordinated “race.”[109] Anglo elites certainly recognized it as such, with one newspaper dismissing those who tried to blame the revolt on Mexican nationals, instead referring to the inferior and rebellious character of the “Mexican race” in Texas. It described the “mob” as “Mexicans in blood, in interest and in sentiment and in behavior.”[110] This sentiment was not mere spur of the moment anger, but a common sentiment of Anglo elites in the 1870s towards resistant Mexicanos in the borderlands. They considered their continuing practices of mestizaje in defiance of anti-miscegenation measures, their crossing of the border in movement and community connections, and their defense of land rights as proving the incorrigibility of Mexicanos.[111] The repression of the rebels, a quintessentially Gilded Age episode with the government openly brutalizing poor masses on behalf of property and capital, overlapped directly with Reconstruction in a significant manner. From the beginning of the 1870s, the U.S. Army had stationed many Black buffalo soldiers along the borderlands to defend against Indigenous and Mexicano raids.[112] Along with Anglo Texas Rangers, these men composed some of the repressing forces deployed to enforce the new property order. When the rebels chanted “mueran los gringos [death to the Americans],” they may have included these Black buffalo soldiers in their denunciation. The Federal government’s continued employment of the buffalo soldiers as a law-keeping force along the Rio Grande reinforced this consciousness among Mexicanos, which considered the “Mexican race” and the “Black race” as distinct. The bureaucratic management of and definition of Blackness thus served to directly affect the growing racial consciousness of Mexicanos as neither Black, White, nor Indigenous.
“Mexican” as a legal category appeared relatively distinguished from other “races,” being roughly delineated from them, but lacked a consistent definition within this delineation. As far as law concerned itself, Mexicanos were still considered white in line with legal precedent. In practice, however, this did not always seem to be the case. Anglo-Texan courts found great difficulty in trying to racially define and regulate Mexicanos, particularly along the Rio Grande. A significant part of this confusion was due to Mexicanos having distinct racial practices and worldviews to Anglos.
Anti-miscegenation policies crafted by Anglo officials from the 1870s onward further reflected Mexicanos’ simultaneous racial ambiguity and distinction. Mexicanos in this region continued the practice of “interracial” marriage as a means of securing social cohesion and political inclusion, undermining any dichotomous definitions of race.[113] While most elite Tejanos sought intermarriage almost exclusively with Anglo-Americans, working-class Mexicanos along the border had few racial qualms in the practice of mestizaje. Militant white republicans had long expressed their suspicion of “Black” ancestry among many Mexicanos, a concern which extended into attempts to police the color line in the 1870s and 1880s.[114] These poorer Mexicanos in the borderlands acculturated to, worked alongside with, and married Black Americans.[115] Black Americans used the assimilative and ambiguous reality of this mestizaje to subvert apparatuses of anti-Black oppression like the Black Codes and anti-miscegenation laws. With the opportunity to assimilate into a mestizo-ness and pass as non-Black Mexicanos, many Black people considered mestizaje as a useful strategy for freedom.[116]
Some officials used anti-miscegenation policies to attempt to quarantine mestizaje to working-class Mexicano communities.[117] They considered these lower classes to be non-white anyway, and so did not see them as necessarily violating the color line - this contradicted the legal status of Mexicanos as white. It also failed to identify the status of Afro-Mexicanos. The 1873 Texas Supreme Court Case Honey v. Clark attempted to address this by classifying an Afro-Tejana identified only as Sobrina as a “mulatto.”[118] On this basis, her marriage with the Anglo John C. Clark violated anti-miscegenation statutes. Anglo legislators and police considered anyone with African ancestry to be considered Black, and thus subject to these policies, while Mexicanos with no African ancestry were still legally white. Police conducting an 1893 raid in El Paso followed this policy in punishing Black American-Mexicano couples for miscegenation.[119]
Customarily, however, the whiteness of Mexicanos lacked much weight. As class distinctions intensified, particularly along racial lines, they increasingly tended to define Mexicanos as a non-white race.[120] Ranchers practiced racial distinctions among their labor forces, solidifying the coherence of a “Mexican race.” They replaced freedmen with Mexicanos, spoke of these two groups as distinct “races” and competing labor pools, distinguished between white and Mexican jobs, and paid Mexicans “Mexican wages.”[121] In short, Anglo domination tinged the everyday lives of Mexicanos in the borderlands with a common character according to a racial script of a peon-proletarian underclass. Mexicanos recognized a similar racialization in their own and that of Black people, though considered them distinct. A corrido from the period expressed this sentiment thusly: “Black woman [negra], for God’s sake, take this example to heart;/never give your love to a white man,/because the whites will never allow/those of color to mix with them.”[122] In this sense, those Mexicanos could quite rationally think of themselves as a coherent group called a “Mexican race.”
The life and times of social critic and activist Catarino Erasmo Garza in the borderlands represented this historical juncture for Mexicanos quite explicitly. Garza was born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas in 1859, the same year as the First Cortina War.[123] He then moved to Brownsville, Texas in 1877, the year of the El Paso Salt War, and began his career as a journalist.[124] In his encounters with Tejanos, he developed a sense of the effects of racialization. Marked by Anglo domination, Garza considered Tejanos to have “customs [which] cannot be said to be Mexican or American, since they are so simple that they deal with each other in the same manner as savages.”[125] He essentially considered them to be degenerated by their condition, being left a pathetic shadow of Mexican national character by Anglo white supremacy. He recognized racialization, incorporation into the Anglo-American racial system, as distinguishing them from Mexican nationals.
Despite his disgust, he considered many of them to have resisted the destruction of their distinct civilizational character even while “unjustly suffering the depravities of hundreds of ambitious [Anglo-]Texans, who through illegal means and with the support of public officials of bad faith, lie on their property[...]”[126] What had once been their nationality had now become their “race” in the Texan context. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had identified their “character” of Mexicanidad as problematic, demanding that they renounce “the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic” in order to become U.S. citizens.[127] That the Anglo Treatymakers recognized that there was a possibility of retaining such “character” even within a totally separate sovereign from Mexico - the U.S. - indicates their consciousness of this potential racialization. Having a Mexican “character” within the U.S. meant ‘falling short’ of full Americanness, or being second-class citizens marked off by difference. This “character of the citizens of the Mexican republic” had become a racial “character” in their incorporation as second-class citizens in the U.S. who remained outsiders to its civil society and political system.
Garza turned his career towards a defense of these Mexico-Texanos in the press, particularly in his newspaper El Comercio Mexicano. His responses to Anglo racism prove especially revealing of racial formations in the borderlands. For instance, in an 1878 article, he castigated a white Brownsville lawyer named Rossell who stated that a white man is worth more than ten Mexicans.[128] Finding Mexican officials useless in his campaign, he took up the task of condemning Rossell for himself. In defense of “the race [la raza],” he argued that “one white (American) was not worth more than ten Mexicans (without being black [sin ser negro])[...]”[129] Garza’s choice of words expresses two sentiments in relation to Black people. On one hand, it acknowledges the potential existence of Afro-Mexicanos in order to dismiss them as inferior. On the other hand, he implies a distinction of Mexican racial ‘essence’ from Black racial essence.[130] According to him, those of the “Mexican race,” as long as they are not mixed with the “Black race,” should be considered as basically equal to or superior to the “Anglo-Saxon race.” Their potential Blackness is simply an exteriority, it does not touch the essence of a “Mexican race.” The “Mexican race” is basically non-Black by definition. This is exactly what Tanya Katerí Hernández identifies as the anti-Blackness foundational to Latino racial politics, which appeal to a racial homogeneity.[131]
In the 1880s, Garza continued this delineation of Mexico-Texano racial identity when he began to organize mutualistas, or mutual-aid societies. Mutualismo grew into a very popular social movement among working-class Tejanos in the late 19th and early 20th century and served as an important site of identity formation.[132] Emphasizing ethics of collectivity, racial solidarity, and defense against Anglo oppression, mutualistas influenced much of what would be considered Mexican identity in the turn of the century. Following the tradition of working-class mestizaje, they were some of the first Mexico-Texano organizations to positively identify with mestizo-ness.[133]
As a mutualista, Garza made himself no exception to this mestizaje nationalism. Of the mission of the “Sociedad Hidalgo” which he co-founded, he said their work aimed “to raise the Mexican race [la raza mexicana] to a better social scale in the first town in Texas where I lived [Brownsville].”[134] In contrast to traditional elite Tejano identification with hispanismo, or Spanishness, Garza considered Mexicanos to be a race unto themselves. This is subtly revealed in his talk of a member composition of “worthy Mexicans and several energetic and zealous Spaniards[...]”[135] Despite this rejection of hispanismo, Garza continued to invoke an anti-Black definition of Mexicanness. In an 1886 protest to the Mexican Consul, he demanded intervention in defense of Mexico-Texanos against Anglo violence. In his petition, he contrasted the statuses of the “Black race” and “Mexican race,” saying “in the north, and even in the very south of this country, the blacks were celebrating their emancipation[...] Mexicans in Texas were in worse condition than blacks in Cuba.”[136] Implicitly, Garza expressed a dismissal of Black grievances. The racial bureaucratic apparatuses developed in the Civil War and Reconstruction primarily addressed the conditions of Black Americans. In the eyes of many Mexicanos, including him, this meant that the federal government acted as the patron of Black people. By contrast, Mexico-Texanos had no allies, and were true outsiders in Anglo-Texas forced to appeal to Mexican officials.
By the late 1880s, Garza’s rhetoric grew increasingly militant.[137] With a borderlands perspective addressing both the U.S. and Mexico, he considered the two states to be interpenetrating oppressors in need of revolutionary upheaval. The Porfiriato - Porfirio Diaz’s long undemocratic rule characterized by foreign investment under the promise of “law and order” - and Anglo white supremacy went hand in hand to exploit Mexicano workers and maintain order.[138] His position and approach preceded the Mexican Revolution proper by a few decades. He expressed increasing rage towards Anglos in the press before taking up arms against the dual regime. In an article from 1886, probably published in June, he mocked Anglo racists who had characterized “Mexican blood [la sangre mexicana]” as inferior by saying that “we consider ourselves Mexicans with more purity of blood than Americans, of course in our country there is only one mixture, Spanish and Indian.”[139] Americans, on the other hand, included “Irish adventurers, Polish, Swiss, Prussian, Russian beggars, and most of all, disgusting Africans."[140] His wholesale denunciation of American society struck a nerve with local Anglos.[141] By invoking anti-Blackness as a weapon against them, he reaffirmed the non-Blackness of Mexicans and attacked Anglo-Texans on the basis of their own racial ideology. He therefore spoke quite similarly to the very Porfiriato regime which he now aimed to overthrow, which restricted Black immigration and favored Europeanization of Mexico. [142]
In 1891, Garza formed an army composed significantly of working-class Mexico-Texanos.[143] The Garzistas identified their goal as overthrowing Porfirio Díaz and restoring Mexican Liberalism. That many Mexicanos in the U.S. considered this a desirable aim is notable, as it indicates their identification of their interests with a revolution in Mexico. The Garzistas likely considered the Porfiriato regime and the Anglo-Texan regime to compose one edifice. The two states each oppressed Mexicanos as an exploited underclass, and restricted the mobility of potential revolutionists across their shared border. Their evaluation seemed to be proven by the harsh repression carried out by the U.S. Army and Anglo vigilantes. Even though they restricted their aims to a revolution in Mexico rather than the U.S., Anglos recognized a potential threat to the entire order of the borderlands in the movement. Soldiers indiscriminately threatened, harassed, dispossessed, and murdered Tejanos.[144] Vigilantes killed supposed rebels with no regard for law, suspecting practically all Mexicanos of Garzista sympathy. The majority of the repression came from the U.S. side of the border rather than Mexico, demonstrating just how invested Anglo-Texans were in maintaining control over Mexicanos.[145]
By 1893, Garza fled into exile.[146] Garzistas scattered, the rebel army destroyed. Mexicanos experienced the remainder of the 19th century as a siege. White laborers looked upon Mexicanos with growing hostility, considering them inveterate scabs.[147] A stereotype of Mexicanos as spineless peons informed the approach that many socialists and populists in the period took towards them. One episode involved Anglos challenging Mexicano citizenship on the basis of their being “Indians,” with a case in the Western District Court in In Re Ricardo Rodríguez.[148] The court ruled in favor of Mexicano qualification for legal whiteness and citizenship, in accordance with their Treaty rights.[149] Though this ruling offered a victory for Mexicano citizenship, it did not taste very sweet to Mexico-Texans. It merely secured their legal white status while customarily leaving them at the mercy of the Anglos who had just tried to disenfranchise them. Further, the Populist movement’s hostility to Mexicanos alienated many of them from non-Mexicano working-class politics. The entire episode had served to harden their consciousness as a racialized group which could not be considered Black, Indian, or White.[150]
Jim Crow, Juan Crow, and Proletarian Power150
The rise of Jim Crow in this turn-of-the-century moment marked a racial regime which would affect Black Americans and Mexicanos alike. Anglo-Texans closed the 19th century with campaigns to redefine the color line. These efforts continued well into the 20th century. One Tejano newspaper reported in 1906 of the exclusion of Mexicanos from white primaries, also mentioning that “a colored individual went to Douglas to obtain a license to marry a Mexican, and it was denied because the ‘statutes’ prohibit the union of the black race with the Caucasian.”[151] These two episodes effectively illustrate the dilemma of Mexicanos, whom the law classified as white but whom civil society classified as non-white. It further demonstrates the distinct social positions of the “Black” and “Mexican” races - the Black partner of the couple is the one whom the law targets and distinguishes, while the law does not strictly define “Mexican” as a separate category subject to its own specific and well-defined procedures.
These concerns of Anglos for the enforcement of Jim Crow extended into Mexicano self-distinction from Blackness as well. The federal government continued to station buffalo soldiers along the border, particularly in cities like El Paso and Brownsville. This had long provoked the resentment of the Mexicanos in the region, who had been repressed by these soldiers during multiple episodes in the late 19th century.[152] They resented these soldiers as upsetting the racial system, putting the “Black race” above the “Mexican race” with the authority of federal governance.[153] Traditionally, it had been the “Mexican race” which, at least on paper, held legal superiority and equality with white Anglos, giving them a comfortable distance from legally subordinate Black people. The political power of the soldiers, as representatives of the Federal government, humiliated them by contradicting this traditional racial norm. In 1906, Brownsville locals falsely accused buffalo soldiers of murdering a white bartender and wounding a white
policeman.[154] Though the incident is remembered as one of white anti-Blackness, many local Mexicanos similarly opposed the presence of the buffalo soldiers.[155] Anglos distinguished themselves from Mexicanos by customarily segregating them from their communities and from Black Americans by legally segregating them, and Mexicanos distinguished themselves from Black Americans by identifying the “Black race” with Federal racial bureaucracy.[156] Black people, in their eyes, were the subject of the Freedmen’s Bureau, Federal military occupations and legal interventions, and the employment of Buffalo Soldiers. By contrast, federal power addressed no such distinct “Mexican” racial subject.
The different practices used by Anglos for Jim Crow and Juan Crow reveal two related but distinct processes of racial formations. In many ways, the racial scripts of Juan Crow derived from Jim Crow in a modified fashion. The social, legislative, and political oppression of Black people served as the model racial script for the oppression of Mexicanos. Anti-Blackness dwelled more historically deep-seated in the U.S.[157] Anglos excluded both Black Americans and Mexicanos from schools, offices, restaurants, properties, housing, and jobs classified as “white.”[158] For Black Americans, however, they invoked de jure policies to justify segregation. Anglo officials had Plessy v. Ferguson and an entire edifice of anti-miscegenation, segregation, and anti-Black policies at their disposal to regulate and restrict Black Americans.[159] Mexicanos, on the other hand, more often found themselves excluded on customary or de facto grounds where law allowed it.[160] This was not the least due to their legal standing as white, which challenged the direct application of Black legal racial scripts to their case. Though white primaries excluded both Black Americans and Mexicanos, only the former were actually considered legally non-white.[161] Once again, Anglo racial bureaucracy addressed a “Black race” and therefore defined a “Mexican race” only implicitly.
Mexicanos would fill this “race” with positive content through a growing working-class movement. In the turn of the century, the working classes had exploded into militancy across the country. Texas could be no exception, with tenant unions, labor unions, a Socialist Party, and the Populist tendency uniting all of them. The mainstream of this working-class upheaval defined itself as essentially Anglo in the south Texas context. White workers demanded “white man’s wages” rather than “Mexican wages.”[162] Anglo capitalists and workers alike considered Mexicanos as peons, super-exploitable and especially pliable.[163] White-majority working-class organizations, from the Socialist Party to the American Federation of Labor, tended to neglect Mexicanos.[164] For reasons of both prejudice and a language barrier, they did not consider them worth the effort. In light of this neglect and a growing alienation from Americanness, working-class Mexicanos had to organize themselves.
Mexicano militancy and self-organization directly contradicted Anglo stereotypes of their being a race of peons. Against Juan Crow, Mexicanos proliferated radical proletarian politics which were deeply embedded in a racialized identity. Spanish-speaking rural workers organized work crews and elected a bilingual leader - el capitán - to mediate between them and the Anglo capitalists.[165] This technique strengthened laborers’ bond, reinforcing their common identity through cooperative labor and shared language, as well as their triangulation in relation to the white Anglo ruling classes and both white and Black workers. A broad array of organizations appealed to a similar sense of identity in a “Mexican race” among workers, including mutualistas, the Partido Liberal Mexicano, El Primer Congreso Mexicanista, and the journal La Crónica.[166] Not all of these groups agreed in their programs, values, or definitions of Mexicano identity. All, however, appealed to some form of a “Mexican race” as a coherent bloc.
They followed precedent in continuing to define this “Mexican race” as non-Black and non-Anglo. While Anglo-Texan militants like the Socialist politician Tom Hickey denounced Mexicano racial character, these radicals developed a racial-class cohesion independent of Anglo workers.[167] They appealed less to American national identity and values than to the traditions of Mexican mestizaje republicanism, celebrating Mexican national holidays in rituals of identity formation. El Primer Congreso Mexicanista, for instance, expressed an “endearing affection for the Mexican race [la raza mexicana] that produces the blood that circulates through our veins[...]” and pride in being part of a common “Mexican family [familia mexicano]” with Mexican nationals.[168]
This notion of a “familia mexicano” played a significant part in the development of pan-Mexican politics in this period. Mexicanos, regardless of nationality, held one racial interest. This line of thinking combined with the revolutionary sentiments of such organizations, which called for the solidarity of the “Mexican race” against all oppressors and exploiters - whether they were Anglo-Texans or the Porfiriato. One author in La Crónica went as far as to argue that, “with greater zeal and tenacity” than the Republic of Mexico,” Mexico-Texanos “work[ed] for the abolition of slavery and for the exaltation and dignification of the Mexicans of Texas, without being Mexican consuls or having an interested relationship with any of them or with the Government of Mexico.”[169] This distancing from the Porfiriato and emphasis on autonomy tied grassroots working-class activism with the “redemption of the Mexican race [redención de la raza mexicana].” It would be the workers of the “familia mexicano” who would uplift themselves and their fellow workers by their own efforts, across the border. Mexico-Texanos such as this author went further, considering themselves to be vanguards of racial consciousness.
This solidarity based on “the blood that circulates through our veins,” however, also meant a certain sentiment of racial purity. The activists in this Mexicanist wave set their relationship with Blackness as ambiguous at best, however. A 1910 article in La Crónica denounced the Porfiriato for importing Black workers rather than Mexico-Texanos. The paper complained that “Blacks are ignorant, immoral, pretentious and lack intelligence. The crossing with the Mexican race would bring as a consequence the moral degeneration of the same[...]”[170] Obviously, these commentators did not seriously know of or consider to be significant the Black ancestry of many Mexicanos, especially in the borderlands. To them, Blackness appeared as a pollution in a relatively coherent collectivity of the “Mexican race.” Though such racist commentary filled significantly less space in the pages of Spanish-language newspapers in the area compared to English, this still acted as an important facet of the definition of the “Mexican race.”
This collective turn towards Mexico also meant a stricter definition of the “Mexican race” well in line with the Jim Crow era’s sharper delineations of racial categories. These Mexico-Texanos borrowed some of the content of this “race” from the hispanista and indigenista rhetoric of the Mexican nation-state, bringing its nation-building discourses into the U.S. borderlands. Though this working-class movement had little sympathy for Díaz’s dictatorship, it shared some of its anti-Black sentiments.
Mexico-Texanos’ turn towards Mexico reflected a growing hope in a Mexican Revolution as an agent of change.[171] Like Catarino Garza, they recognized the affinity of the Porfiriato and Texas’s social order. For borderlands revolutionaries like PLM leader Ricardo Flores Magón, a Mexican Revolution could mean both a restoration of Liberalism and a social revolution carried out by a growing proletarian power. When the Revolution finally broke out in 1910, Magón and the PLM put themselves in the vanguard.[172] They set the tone for the Revolution as a whole, though few other rebels shared their anarcho-communist militancy. With a significant anti-Díaz contingent in Texas, it could only be a matter of time before the fire of the Revolution would blow north.[173] Porfirio Díaz had abandoned Mexicanos in the U.S. to Anglo devices, but Tejano radicals wondered whether a revolution could change this status quo. Pan-Mexicanism, social revolution, and anti-Anglo-Americanism coalesced into a potent ground for racial upheaval.
Equality and Independence of Races and Peoples
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández has described the Plan de San Diego and the sedicioso movement as “one of the largest — and deadliest — uprisings against white settler supremacy in U.S. History.”[174] This characterization gestures towards a thorough groundedness in the concerns of Mexico-Texanos. True, many Mexican nationals as far south as Mexico City had come to identify the Porfiriato and the Anglo-Texan regime as common oppressors of the Mexican masses.[175] It was Tejanos, however, who had placed emphasis on the former in borderlands politics. The Garzista movement was the most recent major uprising in local memory. The anarcho-communist Magónista movement, which had a presence across the north of Mexico, also took on this emphasis in its later period.[176] This should be understood in light of Regeneración’s revival in Texas after its decline in Mexico - by November of 1915, most subscribers to the PLM organ were in Texas. The paper recorded its total number of subscribers as 2,619, with 1,052 of them in Texas.[177] Tejanos participated actively in these borderlands politics, bringing their own U.S.-focused perspective to the table. The subtle details of the Plan’s rhetoric and demands offer indications of its groundedness in the history of the Texas-Mexico borderlands.
The Plan, in a general sense, is a text addressing racialization within Texan conditions. Calling for a bloc of “the Negro race,” “the Latin race” “the Japanese race,” and “Indians,” it set out a vision for a broad racial coalition against Anglo society.[178] The reference to the “Latin race” indicates pan-Latin-American aspirations common to the Mexican Revolutionary period. Many Latin Americans - those in the U.S. included - recognized it as signaling the potential opening of a continental wave of change.[179] The notion of an overarching Latinidad, distinguished racially and civilizationally from the Anglo U.S., had become standard among nationalists from José Martí of Cuba to Augusto César Sandino of Nicaragua.
The authors lay special emphasis on the conditions of “the Negro race,” a very significant concern in Jim Crow Texas. It refers to Black people four times, while white Anglo-Americans are addressed only once in the call for their extermination. The sedicioso movement attracted a not insignificant number of Black American supporters, who recognized it as a potential for a broad racial revolution.[180] A manifesto intended to recruit Black people to the rebellion, attributed to the Revolutionary Congress of San Diego, is especially revealing. It denounces the United States as “The false civilization and Liberty,” comparing Anglos to hyenas and characterizing them as “a race that is inferior to you[....]”[181] The manifesto focuses on Black oppression under Anglo white supremacy as being a situation wherein “he makes you double your kneese [sic] and works you brains and expect to fight for him and help crush e friendly natión [Mexico].”
The only Indigenous nation the original Plan singles out by name as a potential ally is the “Apaches,” who were known to the peoples of the borderlands by their own encounters as powerful warriors.[182] Such identification of many distinct bands under the name “Apache” itself should be understood as an inheritance of their encounters with colonial societies like Mexico and the U.S.[183] These nation-states identified them on the basis of the significance of “Apaches” to their own ‘civilization’-building projects, thus grouping them into one category as a threatening people. This included the experience of Mexicanos themselves in colonizing middle North America. Geronimo, the famous Bedonkohe Apache leader, expressed his distaste for them to S. M. Barrett: “[...]I was always glad to fight the Mexicans.”[184]
This specific identification with the “Apaches,” who had spent over a century fighting Mexicans, seems contradictory with the Plan’s pan-Mexican nationalism. This can perhaps be understood, however, as emerging out of an understanding of Mexicanos as a similarly subordinated people, and thus as having a common cause even with Indigenous peoples who had once been their mortal enemies. The Plan’s call for alliance with Indigenous peoples is offered with the promise that “their lands which have been taken from them shall be returned to them[...]”[185] This theft of Indigenous land is listed as a distinct one from those Mexican states which were “robbed in a most perfidious manner by North American imperialism.”[186] The authors express a certain affinity to Indigenous peoples, a sentiment common to organizations like the PLM and Congreso Mexicanista, while considering the “Mexican race” to be distinct. This affinity could only appear rational in uniting experiences of Anglo colonization and racialization, as the encounters of Cortina and Tampacua peoples indicates. Hardline white republicans had long conflated the “Mexican race” and Indigenous peoples, from legal officials to journalists and politicians. The Plan and sediciosos took up this association as a positive identity.
The sediciosos considered themselves fully alienated from the U.S., an Anglo society, but not quite Mexican in nationality. Their call for an independent republic, in the borderlands, neither American nor Mexican, expressed a utopian projection of radical Mexico-Texano consciousness. Their spatialization of their claims mapped onto local histories of racial formation. This included their internalizations of how the Anglo-Americans had defined races. The Plan left the relation between the sovereignty of the “Mexican race” and the “Indians” ambiguous, reflecting both the inheritance of mestizaje republicanism and the ambiguous relationship of the two categories in Texas. Many Indigenous peoples in Texas had been forced into Oklahoma, confined on reservations, or stripped of their political status as “domestic dependent nations” and driven to assimilation.[187] The Plan did not make clear how this restoration of homelands might look - did it mean the independence of reservations? After all, the ancestral homelands of Indigenous peoples in Texas and across the borderlands included the territories the sediciosos intended to claim for their new republic.
The Plan further seems to exclude “Indians” from the “Liberating Army for Races and Peoples,” as it only enumerates “the Latin, the Negro, or the Japanese race” as eligible for enrollment.[188] It called for “the Negro race” to form an independent republic in the southeastern United States, implying a conflation of Blackness with the U.S. South.[189] The authors seem to have been thinking in the terms of U.S. racial bureaucracy, which similarly conflated Blackness with enslavement or former enslavement, which it in turn conflated with Southerness. They therefore subtly exclude Blackness from Mexicanness, following the precedent of a century of racial formation. The movement fundamentally rejected the Anglo-Texan order, while still speaking in terms marked by Anglo-settler forms of power.
The Plan’s very Manichaean expression of war without quarter against “North Americans” reveals an embeddedness in Texas racial history. From 1836 onward, white republicans had solidified a legal and customary conflation of “U.S. citizen,” “Anglo,” and “white.” Their practices of Jim Crow and Juan Crow made racial Manichaeism a real situation in everyday life. In the early Texas Republic compromise order of semi-mestizaje, this expression would not have made sense to Mexicanos. When Anglo white republicans sharply separated and defined the “races,” grouping together all non-”whites” as the opposite of themselves, they created this very situation. It was simply up to the sediciosos to actualize it from the other side, responding in kind with a Manichaeism of the racialized.
On this basis, Ricardo Flores Magón’s evaluation of the sediciosos as “a real economic and social movement” seems quite agreeable.[190] Magón considered it to be an especially radical expression of Texas’s racial-class situation.[191] Though Magón supported the movement, he and the PLM had no actual control over it.[192] The Magónistas involved, such as Pizaña, proved to be Tejanos representing a Tejano tendency in the movement rather than agents of a “foreign” movement.[193] The later versions of the Plan drafted by Magónista sediciosos challenge the claims of scholars like Sadler and Harris that the movement was artificial. Rather than focusing on the spectacle of the text in itself, the momentum of this historical moment puts the significance of the Plan into perspective. Sedicioso ideology’s variations also reveal commonalities, which can be considered a spirit of the moment. In an August 1915 version titled “To Our Compatriots the Mexicans in Texas,” Pizaña and de la Rosa affirmed the solidarity of “our race [nuestra raza],” calling once again for revolution against “los gringos.”[194] Turning colonial rhetoric on its head, they denounced Anglos as “that mob of savages, who would put to shame the hungry tiger and the nauseating hyena.”[195] They once again demanded the utopia of a Mexico-Texano republic to be forged in the borderlands.[196]
By February 20th, another group of Magónistas issued an explicitly anarchist version of the Plan.[197] This version kept the calls for an alliance of all non-”whites” against “Yankee arrogance,” total war against Anglo men and “traitors to our oppressed race,” the restoration of lands to “Apache Indians[...] and the redskins of the territory,” and the independence of “the Black race.”[198] It added anarcho-communist calls for “abolition of racial hatred,” “Absolute communalization” of lands, the “Establishment of Modern Schools,” and a society which would have “UNIVERSAL LOVE as a rule.”[199] These goals, taken as a whole, were basically in line with the militant edge of Mexicano working-class movements.[200] Even if U.S. citizens did not author these documents, their texts still demonstrate a strong familiarity with local history and social conditions. The sedicioso movement could perhaps have been something like the Cortinistas and Garzistas, who were initially led by Mexican nationals but the masses of whom were largely Mexico-Texano.
The movement’s ability to express the spirit of a moment should not be understood as meaning that it was the only possible outlook. As many scholars have argued, the sediciosos did not recruit nearly as many people as they had expected.[201] Most Mexicanos in Texas were not willing to themselves take up arms in such a risky endeavor and for such unrealistic aims. The movement did, however, strike a chord of sympathy with them. Anglo police and soldiers found great difficulty in tracking down and eliminating sedicioso guerrillas, not the least due to the non-cooperation of Mexicanos.[202] Whatever they thought of the movement, many considered them closer to their interests than they did Anglo authorities. The actual coherence and cohesion of a “Mexican race,” created by Anglo practices of racialization, offered a basis of resistance. Mexicanos knew that the government was a “white man’s government,” and was not really theirs. They did not trust the Anglo authorities to do anything except harm them. Anglo-Texans, in turn, responded by confirming these sentiments.
La Matanza and the “Mexican Race” in a New Century
Anglos initially derided the Plan as ridiculous, but quickly turned to hysteria once some of ‘their Mexicans’ started pointing guns at them.[203] At the beginning of the year, they mockingly attributed the Plan to the delusions of Basilio Ramos and co. Once sedicioso activity picked up towards the latter part of 1915, many were blaming the entire “Mexican race” for the rebellion. One Anglo paper called in August for General Frederick Funston to occupy the entire borderlands with an iron fist, making “the worthless greasers prefer wading the river Styx to the Rio Grande.”[204] The author considered this a moderate compromise, believing that Mexico-Texanos should ideally be expelled entirely from Texas.[205] Other papers spoke of the hysteria in terms conflating “American” and “Anglo,” with one issue from the same month reporting that “[ranchers] said only thirteen American men remain in San Diego. Mexicans there are all reported armed and are said to have been buying ammunition in quantities.”[206] To the Anglo press, the sedicioso movement was universal across the Mexicanos of the borderlands. The U.S. Army seemed to agree, as it began to occupy segregated “Mexican quarters” in borderlands cities to prevent rebellion by the end of that month.[207]
While the U.S. Army largely restricted its activities to occupation and counterinsurgency, it did not shy away from participating in racial terror and massacres either. Like in their repression of the Garzistas two decades before, soldiers harassed countless innocent Mexicanos.[208] The Texas Rangers went much further. They coordinated a broad campaign against Mexicanos, leaving almost no one safe from violence at the hands of state authority[209]. They worked hand in hand with Anglo vigilantes to massacre Mexicanos accused of sedicioso sympathy, regardless of any lack of proof.[210] The violence continued well into the next decade, with Mexicanos referring to the period as La Matanza [The Slaughter].[211] The Anglos-Texans’ violence became intense enough to provoke the indignation of arch-racist President Woodrow Wilson.[212] The Department of Justice intervened against the Texas Rangers, but had little success in ceasing the bloodbath. Federal investigators estimated the terrorists reached a death count of around 300 Mexicanos.[213] Contemporary historians estimate from this 300 between 1915 and 1916 up to the “low thousands” by 1919.[214]
Anglo-Texans repressed Mexicanos as a general group, and therefore generalized the racial identity of Mexicanness. In the dawn of this new century, Mexicanos found themselves less and less differentiated by class, both materially and in their treatment by Anglos. The old Anglo-Tejano elite alliance, which had traditionally secured cohesion and protection, had long been buried by Anglos - save for isolated pockets. The broad masses of Mexicanos now lived almost identical to a racialized proletariat. By the 1920s, speaking in the global shockwaves of he Russian Revolution, Anglos began to complain that Mexicanos were natural Bolsheviks.[215] After the Plan de San Diego, many Anglo-Texans believed that Mexicanos had decisively proven themselves as non-white and incompatible with the American “stomach.”[216]
Tejanos responded with despair, anger, and indignation at their repression. One contemporary corrido characterized the sedicioso movement as one of “true-born Mexicans [puros mexicanos],” while it was “the Texas-Mexicans [mexicotejanos] who will have to pay the price.”[217] Even those who actively opposed and denounced the sediciosos such as the politician J.T. Canales experienced harassment and violence from Anglo-Texan officials and vigilantes.[218] The Tejano press tried to align with the U.S. government, hoping to maintain their standing. They dismissed the rebellion as a movement of “the lower class of Mexicans residing in the State of Texas,” if they even considered it native to Texas at all.[219] In June 1915, a group of at least 40 Mexicanos petitioned to President Wilson pleading for a “more pleasant relation of their race and the Anglo-Saxons,” asking for “equal justice under the law” while denouncing “the fact that among mexicans here are any who would perpetrate the terrible wrongs wrought by bandits in the territory south of here, or who would conspire against this, our government.”[220] Not all Mexicanos turned to Americanist or assimilative politics, but they did find themselves confronting the reverberations of the Plan and La Matanza.
From 1916 onward, Mexico-Texano organizers consistently spoke in terms of the “Mexican race.” Their definitions of this “race” differed. Almost all, however, agreed on the basic coherence of that “race” such that one could dispute its content within the delineation of the category.[221] The existence of a “Mexican race,” distinct from either Mexican nationality or a homogenous U.S. citizenry, was not under dispute. The “Bolshevik” Mexicanos, so feared by Anglo elites, fought for the rights of their “race” in a struggle aligned directly with the “Black race.”[222] The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA) in Texas both deployed this racial rhetoric. Emma Tenayuca, a major activist in both, considered the racialized conditions of Mexicanos to be the key concern for any working-class movement in the region.[223]
On the other end of the spectrum, the Americanist League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) campaigned for white citizenship rights. They strongly denounced any attempt by Anglo officials to group Mexicanos with non-”white” “races,” especially the so-called “Negro race.”[224] Even in this white strategy, however, they confronted the distinctness of Mexicanos. Alonso Perales, the Tejano president of LULAC in the 1930s, expressed that “we are very proud of our racial origins and we do not wish to give the impression that we are ashamed of being called 'Mexicans.' Nevertheless, we have always resented the inference that we are not whites."[225] Perales conceded that, if the federal government was to distinguish Mexicanos for the purposes of statistics, it ought to consider the “white race” as subdivided between “Anglo” and “Latin” variants. LULAC activism on this front essentially aimed to expand the definition of “white” from “Anglo” to include Mexicanos. Their very strategy for white rights implied that such a status was more of an illusion than ever, thus necessitating its defense.
The “Mexican race” had thus been solidified by 1915 and its aftermath as a basically coherent racial grouping, following from a history of over 70 years. Texas incorporated Mexicanos as a ‘problem’ people in its definition of citizenship as white. By excluding “Africans, descendants of Africans, and Indians,” it left Mexicanness as an ambiguous middle ground which was not quite Black, White, or Indian. Initially, these remaining ex-Mexican citizens could claim a shaky legal whiteness. However, Anglos worked to sever themselves from integration into a mestizaje legacy and to revolutionize law and property in favor of Anglo white republicanism.
Multiple generations erupted in response to dispossession, from the Cortinistas to the Magónistas. As time went on, these social movements filled the ambiguous middle ground of Mexicanness with a positive content. With the radical proletarianization of the early 20th century and the global upheavals represented by the Mexican Revolution and World War I, these militants of the “Mexican race” took up arms against Anglo white supremacy. Met with generalized racial repression, the masses of Mexico-Texanos began to definitively feel themselves as part of a cohesive “Mexican race.”
Tejano activists, acting in the wake of this inheritance, tended to follow the outlines of Anglo racial repression by responding in kind as a “Mexican race.” This history proved to be ground for the rise of the Chicanx movement in the latter half of the century. Though the activists of that movement largely disagreed with the Americanist strategy of LULAC, they similarly addressed the conditions of Mexicanos as a racialized group within the U.S. Both Mexicanos and Anglos created La Raza. La Raza stands today as an active and continued creation of everyday people and a scar of history.
[1] Provisional Directorate of the Plan of San Diego, Texas, “The Plan de San Diego,” in The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue, by Louis R. Sadler and Charles H. Harris (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), pp. 1-5.
[2] I use Mexicano as a generic label for ethnic Mexicans to indicate linguistic and social difference, as well as to distinguish the category from citizens of the United States of Mexico.
[3] Rodolfo Rocha, “The Tejano Revolt of 1915,” in Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays, ed. Emilio Zamora, Cynthia E. Orozco, and Rodolfo Rocha (Austin, Texas: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), p. 104.
[4] Quoted in James A. Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2022), p. 85.
[5] I use ‘Mexicano’ to refer to people of Mexican descent, especially in the borderlands, rather than those with Mexican nationality or citizenship. To refer to the latter, I will use the term ‘Mexican national.’ When specifying those of Mexican descent from Texas, I follow the historical actors’ conventions and use the terms ‘Tejano’ and ‘Mexico-Texano.’
[6] Benjamin Heber Johnson, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 73-74.
[7] Following its use in Mexican Spanish, I use Anglo as a label to indicate Euro-Americans considered linguistically, culturally and politically to be citizens of the United States.
[8] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 87.
[9] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 72-73.
[10] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 71-72.
[11] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 80-83.
[12] Sadler and Harris, The Plan de San Diego, pp. 259-263.
[13] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 87; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 79-83.
[14] Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States, 3rd ed. (New York, New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 110
[15] Natalia Molina, How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2014), p. 6.
[16] The development of a homogenous citizenry in Mexico, premised on the abolition of New Spain’s sistema de castas, also meant the rendering invisible of Blackness in a ‘whitened’ racial mixture ideology. Karl Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire, 1st ed. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2016), p. 14.
[17] Tanya Katerí Hernández, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality (Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2022), p. 10.
[18] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York, New York: Grove Press, 2004, pp. 152-158.
[19] Charles C. Cumberland, “Border Raids in the Lower Rio Grande Valley-1915,” The Southwestern Historical Quarterly 57, no. 3 (1954): 286-287; William H. Hager, “The Plan of San Diego Unrest on the Texas Border in 1915,” Arizona and the West 5, no. 4 (1963): 336. This perspective was also not alien to Tejanos at the time, as proven by the case of J.T. Canales, who served as a Texas State representative between 1917 and 1921.Louis R. Sadler and Charles H. Harris, The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), p. 259.
[20] Sadler and Harris, The Plan de San Diego, p. 260.
[21] Sadler and Harris, The Plan de San Diego, p. X. They also go as far as to complain about “a fair amount of Hispanic racism towards Anglos.” Sadler and Harris, The Plan de San Diego, p. 260.
[22] Juan Gómez-Quiñones, “Plan de San Diego Reviewed,” Aztlan 1, no. 1 (1970): 127.
[23] Sonia Hernández and John Morán González, eds., Reverberations of Racial Violence: Critical Reflections on the History of the Border (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2021), p. 264; Andrew J. Torget and Gerardo Gurza Lavalle, These Ragged Edges: Histories of Violence along the U.S.-Mexico Border (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022), p. 282; Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1st ed. (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2009), pp. 40-43.
[24] Cynthia E. Orozco, No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement, 1st ed. (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2009), pp. 43-49; David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, 11th ed. (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2006), pp. 124-128; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 188-192.
[25] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 197-198.
[26] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, p. 2; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 81-83.
[27] Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, 11th ed. (New York, New York: International Publishers, 1992), p. 419.
[28] Convention of 1836, “The Constitution of the Republic of Texas,” in Documents of Texas History, ed. Ernest Wallace, David M. Vigness, and George B. Ward (Austin, Texas: Texas Historical Association, 2002), p. 103; Martha Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans, The Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2001), pp. 227-229.
[29] United States Congress, “An Act to Establish an Uniform Rule of Naturalization” (1790), https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1790-nationality-act/.
[30] Convention of 1836, “The Constitution of the Republic of Texas,” p. 104.
[31] Mark M. Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in Frontier Texas, 1823-1860, 2nd ed., Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture 3 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005), p. 5.
[32] Arnoldo de León, They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1983), pp. 15-16.
[33] Douglas W. Richmond, “Africa’s Initial Encounter with Texas: The Significance of Afro-Tejanos in Colonial Tejas, 1528-1821,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (2007): 200–221; Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528-1990 (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. 34.
[34] de León, They Called Them Greasers, pp. 18-20.
[35] Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), p. 109.
[36] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 5.
[37] Menchaca, Recovering History, Constructing Race, pp. 228-230.
[38] de León, They Called Them Greasers, pp. 49-51.
[39] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 43.
[40] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 49.
[41] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 44.
[42] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 233-235.
[43] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, pp. 43-45.
[44] “Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo [Exchange Copy],” February 2, 1848, General Records of the United States Government, 1778-1992; Perfected Treaties, 1778-1945; Record Group 11, National Archives, p. 2, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=26&page=transcript.
[45] James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University, 2002), pp. 26-28.
[46] “Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo,” p. 3.
[47] Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, “Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin,” in A Revolution Remembered: The Memoirs and Selected Correspondence of Juan N. Seguín, ed. Jesús F. de la Teja (Austin, Texas: State House Press, 1991), p. 74.
[48] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 16.
[49] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 35.
[50] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 42.
[51] Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas, or, a Saddle-Trip on the Southwest Frontier; with a Statistical Appendix (New York, New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857), p. 65; Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis, p. 20.
[52] “RUNAWAYS TO MEXICO,” The Standard, October 21, 1854; The San Antonio Ledger. “HABEAS CORPUS CASE.” October 10, 1857; Sarah E. Cornell, “Citizens of Nowhere: Fugitive Slaves and Free African Americans in Mexico, 1833-1857,” The Journal of American History 100, no. 2 (2013): 360; Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 60.
[53] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, p. 247; Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 16.
[54] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, pp. 164-166; Martha Menchaca, “Chicano Indianism: A Historical Account of Racial Repression in the United States,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 3 (1993): 587-588.
[55] Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable, p. 35.
[56] Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, pp. 86-88.
[57] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, 219-221.
[58] Jerry Thompson, Cortina: Defending the Mexican Name in Texas, 2nd ed. (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University, 2013), p. 8.
[59] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 15-16.
[60] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 19-20.
[61] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 21-22.
[62] Thompson, Cortina, p. 37.
[63] House of Representatives Executive Document No. 52, 36th Congress, 1st Session (1860), “Difficulties on Southwestern Frontier. Message from the President of the United States, Communicating, in Compliance with a Resolution of the House, Information in Reference to the Difficulties on the Southwestern Frontier.” (University of Oklahoma College of Law, April 2, 1860), p. 70, https://shareok.org/handle/11244/36094.
[64] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 70.
[65] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 72.
[66] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 72.
[67] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 72.
[68] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 72.
[69] In the original Spanish version, this reads “todas las aspiraciones de los Mejicanos se reducen á una sola, el ser libres[...]” Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, “‘Proclama’ Del Ciudadano Nepomuceno Cortinas. J. Nepomuceno Cortinas á Los Habitantes Del Estado de Texas y Con Especialidad á Los de La Ciudad de Brownsville ...,” September 30, 1859, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/12240165.
[70] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 72.
[71] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 45-47.
[72] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 40-44.
[73] Thompson, Cortina, p. 48.
[74] “Extra! - Guerrilla Attack upon Brownsville!,” American Flag, October 1, 1859, https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth78143/.
[75] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 81.
[76] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 80.
[77] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 79.
[78] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 81.
[79] House of Representatives, “Difficulties,” p. 81.
[80] Quoted in Thompson, Cortina, p. 61.
[81] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 221-223.
[82] Thompson, Cortina, p. 93.
[83] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, pp. 53-54.
[84] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 133-134.
[85] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 153-156.
[86] Thompson, Cortina, p. 133-135; Miguel González Quiroga, “Mexicanos in Texas During the Civil War,” in Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays, ed. Emilio Zamora, Cynthia E. Orozco, and Rodolfo Rocha (Austin, Texas: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), pp. 54-55.
[87] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 247-248.
[88] Quiroga, “Mexicanos in Texas,” pp. 57-58.
[89] Quiroga, “Mexicanos in Texas,” pp. 55-56.
[90] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 133-137; Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 252-259.
[91] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 110-112.
[92] Thompson, Cortina, p. 80.
[93] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 154-155.
[94] Thompson, Cortina, p. 11.
[95] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 18-19.
[96] Américo Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1995), p. 47.
[97] Thompson, Cortina, p. 96.
[98] Thompson, Cortina, pp. 224-227.
[99] Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, p. 48.
[100] Barry A. Crouch, The Dance of Freedom: Texas African Americans During Reconstruction, ed. Larry Madaras, Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life, and Culture 19 (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2007), pp. 135-137
[101] Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, 1st ed. (Berkeley, CA; Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1997), p. 25.
[102] Menchaca, The Mexican American Experience, p. 92.
[103] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, p. 236.
[104] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 235-237.
[105] Emilio Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker in Texas, 2nd ed., The Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students 44 (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University, 1995), p. 24.
[106] Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, The Oxford History of the United States (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 6-9.
[107] Martha Menchaca, The Mexican American Experience in Texas: Citizenship, Segregation, and the Struggle for Equality, The Texas Bookshelf (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 2022), pp. 92-97; Allison Tirres, “Law, Race, and the Border: The El Paso Salt War of 1877,” Harvard Law Review 117, no. 3 (2004): 946.
[108] James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University, 2002), pp. 64-65.
[109] Leiker, Racial Borders, p. 10.
[110] “THE EL PASO MASSACRE,” The Galveston Daily News, December 26, 1877.
[111] Leiker, Racial Borders, p. 45.
[112] Leiker, Racial Borders, pp. 28-30.
[113] Elliott Young, Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border, American Encounters/Global Interactions (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 39, 173.
[114] Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas, p. 455; Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, p. 204; Foley, The White Scourge, p. 5.
[115] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 203-204; Foley, The White Scourge, p. 25; Gerald Horne, Black and Brown: African Americans and the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, American History and Culture (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 46-47.
[116] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 38; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, p. 16; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 88; Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis, p. xvii, 48, 200.
[117] Valerio-Jiménez, River of Hope, pp. 203-204.
[118] J. Walker, Honey v. Clark, 37 Tex. 686 (Texas Supreme Court July 1, 1873).
[119] “Miscegenationists Raided,” El Paso Times, October 7, 1893.
[120] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, p. 35; Foley, The White Scourge, p. 59; Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis, p. 63; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 71; Leiker, Racial Borders, p. 10.
[121] Foley, The White Scourge, pp. 41-42.
[122] Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, p. 138.
[123] Young, Catarino Garza, p. 16.
[124] Young, Catarino Garza, p. 31.
[125] “Las costumbres de aquellos habitantes no se puede decir que son ni mexicanas ni americanas, pues son tan sencillas, que a semejanza de las salvajes, se manejan unos con otros.” Catarino E. Garza, Memorias de Catarino E. Garza: la lógica de los hechos, o sea, observaciones sobre las circunstancias de los mexicanos en Texas desde 1877 hasta 1889: Corpus Christi, Texas, vol. 1, Colección Centenarios 3 (Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas: Gobierno del Estado de Tamaulipas, Comisión Organizadora para la Conmemoración en Tamaulipas del Bicentenario de la Independencia y Centenario de Revolución Mexicana, 2009), p. 25.
[126] “[...]sufriendo injustamente las depravaciones de centenares de texanos ambiciosos, que por medios ilegales y con el apoyo de funcionarios públicos de mala fe, se echan sobre sus propiedades[...]” Garza, Memorias, p. 27.
[127] “Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo,” p. 3.
[128] Garza, Memorias, p. 30.
[129] “[...]no valía más un blanco (americano) que diez mexicanos (sin ser negro)[...]” Garza, Memorias, p. 30.
[130] Young, Catarino Garza, p. 35.
[131] Hernández, Racial Innocence, p. 113.
[132] Emilio Zamora, “Mutualist and Mexicanist Expressions of a Political Culture in Texas,” in Mexican Americans in Texas History: Selected Essays, ed. Emilio Zamora, Cynthia E. Orozco, and Rodolfo Rocha (Austin, Texas: Texas State Historical Association, 2000), p. 86.
[133] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, p. 86.
[134] “[...]por elevar en mejor escala social a la raza mexicana en la primera población de Texas que residí.” Garza, Memorias, p. 35.
[135] “[...]dignos mexicanos y varios españoles enérgicos y celosos[...]” Garza, Memorias, p. 35.
[136] “[...]en el norte, y aun en el mismo sur de este país, los negros celebraban su emancipación[...] los mexicanos en Texas estabámos en peor condición que los negros en Cuba.” Garza, Memorias, p. 117.
[137] Young, Catarino Garza, pp. 54-56.
[138] Young, Catarino Garza, pp. 86-90.
[139] “[...]nos consideramos los mexicanos con más pureza de sangre que los americanos, supuesto que en nuestro país solo hay una mezcla, la de español e indio[...]” Garza, Memorias, p. 102.
[140] “[...]aventureros irlandeses, mendigos polacos, suizos, prusianos, rusos, y más que todo, africanos asquerosos.” Garza, Memorias, p. 102.
[141] Garza, Memorias, pp. 101-103.
[142] Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis, p. 53, 78, 103.
[143] Young, Catarino Garza, pp. 164-166.
[144] Monica Muñoz Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You: Anti-Mexican Violence in Texas, 1st ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2018), pp. 14-15.
[145] Young, Catarino Garza, pp. 227-236.
[146] Young, Catarino Garza, pp. 268-269.
[147] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 34-36.
[148] Menchaca, The Mexican American Experience, p. 92.
[149] Menchaca, The Mexican American Experience, p. 93.
[150] I use “Juan Crow” to indicate a derivation of segregation policies applied to Mexicanos from practices initially developed to target Black Americans, rather than to imply their non-concurrence.Cecilia Márquez, “Juan Crow and the Erasure of Blackness in the Latina/o South,” Labor 16, no. 3 (2019): 80-81.
[151] “¡Viva la igualdad democrática!,” Clarín del Norte, August 18, 1906.
[152] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 177.
[153] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 177.
[154] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 177.
[155] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, p. 177; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 16-17.
[156] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, pp. 177-178.
[157] Cecilia Márquez, “Juan Crow and the Erasure of Blackness in the Latina/o South,” Labor 16, no. 3 (2019): 82-83.
[158] Menchaca, The Mexican American Experience, pp. 97-98; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, p. 51; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 71; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 95; Kelly Lytle Hernández, Bad Mexicans: Race, Empire, and Revolution in the Borderlands, 1st ed. (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2022), p. 98.
[159] Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, pp. 209-210.
[160] Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, pp. 47-49.
[161] Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 144.
[162] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 23-25.
[163] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 34-36.
[164] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 136-139.
[165] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, p. 67.
[166] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 85-87; El Demócrata Fronterizo, “A los Mexicanos y México-texanos,” May 28, 1910.
[167] Foley, The White Scourge, pp. 94-96; Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 65-68.
[168] “El Congreso Mexicanista Triunfa, Se Discute Nuestro Proyecto,” Crónica, April 13, 1911.
[169] “Peonaje En Texas,” Crónica, February 23, 1911
[170] “Nuestro parecer es que el Gobierno Mexicano...,” Crónica, May 14, 1910.
[171] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 79-80.
[172] Hernández, Bad Mexicans, pp. 279-285.
[173] Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 63-64.
[174] Hernández, Bad Mexicans, p. 299.
[175] Hernández, Bad Mexicans, p. 136.
[176] Hernández, Bad Mexicans, pp. 297-299.
[177] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 59.
[178] Provisional Directorate, “The Plan of San Diego,” pp. 3-4.
[179] Gilbert M. Joseph and Jürgen Buchenau, Mexico’s Once and Future Revolution: Social Upheaval and the Challenges of Rule since the Late Nineteenth Century (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 7-10.
[180] Horne, Black and Brown, pp. 164-165.
[181] Revolutionary Congress of San Diego, “Manifesto Drafts for Negro Recruits,” 1915, Agustin Solis de la Garza Collection, Margaret H. McAllen Memorial Archives, Museum of South Texas History, Edinburg, TX.
[182] Provisional Directorate, “The Plan of San Diego,” p. 3.
[183] Ana María Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, Hegemony and Experience: Critical Studies in Anthropology and History (Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona Press, 1995), pp. 58-63.
[184] S. M. Barrett and Geronimo, Geronimo’s Story of His Life (New York, New York: Duffield & Company, 1906), p. 81.
[185] Provisional Directorate, “The Plan of San Diego,” p. 3.
[186] Provisional Directorate, “The Plan of San Diego,” p. 2.
[187] Janne Lahti, Wars for Empire: Apaches, the United States, and the Southwest Borderlands (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), p. 200, 240-241; Gary Clayton Anderson, The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820-1875 (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), pp. 319-320, 350-361.
[188] Provisional Directorate, “The Plan of San Diego,” p. 4; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 81.
[189] Provisional Directorate, “The Plan of San Diego,” p. 2.
[190] Ricardo Flores Magón, “LOS LEVANTAMIENTOS EN TEXAS,” Regeneración, October 30, 1915, 4a época 1910-1918, Archivo Digital de Ricardo Flores Magón.
[191] Ricardo Flores Magón, “LOS LEVANTAMIENTOS EN TEXAS,” Regeneración, October 2, 1915, 4a época 1910-1918, Archivo Digital de Ricardo Flores Magón; Magón, Regeneración, October 30, 1915.
[192] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 100; Hernández, Bad Mexicans, p. 299.
[193] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 79-83; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 84-87, Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 116; Rocha, “The Tejano Revolt of 1915,” p. 119.
[194] Luis de la Rosa and Aniceto Pizaña, “A Nuestros Compatriotas Los Mexicanos en Texas,” in Rebellion in the Borderlands: Anarchism and the Plan of San Diego, 1904-1923 (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, Oklahoma, 1915), 95.
[195] de la Rosa and Pizaña, “A Nuestros Compatriotas.”
[196] de la Rosa and Pizaña, “A Nuestros Compatriotas.”
[197] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 83-84.
[198] Congreso Revolucionario de San Diego, Texas, “Manifesto: ¡A Los Pueblos Oprimidos De América!,” February 20, 1915, RG 59, M274., Records of the Department of State relating to internal affairs of Mexico, 1910-29.
[199] Congreso Revolucionario, “Manifesto.”
[200] Rocha, “The Tejano Revolt of 1915,” p. 105; Zamora, The World of the Mexican Worker, pp. 83-84; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, p. 37.
[201] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 136-137; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 96-98; Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 117.
[202] Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans, p. 118; Rocha, “The Tejano Revolt of 1915, pp. 119-120; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 90-91.
[203] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 79-85.
[204] “TEACH THE GREASERS A LESSON.,” Waco Morning News, August 13, 1915.
[205] Waco Morning News, August 13, 1915.
[206] “AMERICANS FLEE FROM BORDER CITY,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 23, 1915.
[207] “AMERICAN’S IN THREE COUNTIES UNDER ARMS,” The Cameron Herald, August 12, 1915; Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 23, 1915; “TWO U.S. REGIMENTS CALLED OUT TO QUELL MEXICANS AT EL PASO,” The Austin American, August 26, 1915
[208] Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, p. 22; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 136-138.
[209] Benjamin H. Johnson says “Even a lower death toll would mean that a Tejano in South Texas was far more likely to ‘disappear’ than a citizen of Argentina during that country’s infamous ‘Dirty War’ of the 1970s. Johnson, Revolution in Texas, p. 120, 140-143; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 98-99.
[210] William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb, Forgotten Dead: Mob Violence against Mexicans in the United States, 1848-1928 (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 86.
[211] Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, p. 77.
[212] Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, p. 161.
[213] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 119-120.
[214] Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, p. 77; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, p. 120.
[215] Foley, The White Scourge, p. 49; Neil Foley, “Mexicans, Mechanization, and the Growth of Corporate Cotton Culture in South Texas: The Taft Ranch, 1900-1930,” The Journal of Southern History 62, no. 2 (May 1996): 297.
[216] Foley, The White Scourge, pp. 54-55.
[217] Paredes, A Texas-Mexican Cancionero, p. 73.
[218] Carrigan and Webb, Forgotten Dead, pp. 87-88; Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, pp. 187-189.
[219] “LAS AUTORIDADES MILITARES CREEN QUE HAN TERMINADO LA REVUELTA EN TEXAS,” La Prensa, October 9, 1915; “CARRANZA AYUDARA AL GOB. AMERICANO A COMBATIR A LOS MEXICO-TEXANOS,” La Prensa, October 23, 1915; Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 192-197; Sandos, Rebellion in the Borderlands, pp. 108-110.
[220] “MEXICANS OF SOUTH TEXAS PETITION FOR JUSTICE UNDER LAW,” The Austin American, June 5, 1916.
[221] Johnson, Revolution in Texas, pp. 197-198; Martinez, The Injustice Never Leaves You, pp. 90-91.
[222] Foley, “Mexicans,” p. 197; Justin Akers Chacón, Radicals in the Barrio: Magonistas, Socialists, Wobblies, and Communists in the Mexican American Working Class (Chicago, Illinois: Haymarket Books, 2018), pp. 556-559.
[223] Emma Tenayuca and Homer Brooks, “The Mexican Question in the Southwest,” The Communist 18, no. 3 (March 1939): 263-265.
[224] Neil Foley, “Partly Colored or Other White: Mexican Americans and Their Problem with the Color Line,” in Beyond Black and White: Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison M. Parker, Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures 35 (Arlington, Texas: University of Texas, 2004), pp. 130-131.
[225] Quoted in Foley, “Partly Colored,” p. 131.